Presentation should have dictated a lighter touch on the sauce but the steak was in there for the finding.
I have a love-hate relationship with meat. I know it’s cruel. I know it’s environmentally wasteful. In all conscience I shouldn’t be eating it. But I’m weak. And it tastes great.Saturday’s evening meal was steak with veg.
I’ve been eating too much risotto and pasta lately and not enough green vegetables so I decided to go old school and cook up a simple meal of steak, mushrooms, veg and potatoes. It worked out pretty well.
The potatoes were the king of this dish. I know the steak ought to have been but really, I can’t get enough roast potatoes into my gob and these were perfect. You’ll see how they were cooked from the photo. Jersey Royals the size of a small boy’s fist (yes, I measured) were scrubbed and then par-boiled for about 10 minutes whilst I heated up a couple of tablespoons of oil on a roasting tray. You could flavour the oil a bit with garlic but for this I decided to go naked and leave off everything bar the seasoning.
After the 10 minutes were up I poured the hot oil over the potatoes before quickly placing them on to a board and partly slicing. About 2/3rds of the way down and not thinly. The idea is that they stay whole but you get crisping down inside each crack. Then I placed them on the hot roasting tray, poured more hot oil over them and added plenty of salt. Bang, they then went into the oven where they would scream for about an hour at about 200C.
The sauce is the other star and for this I soaked a handful (not smal boy’s this time) of porcini mushrooms in hot water for 20 minutes. Then I heated up my frying pan whilst I chopped an onion into rings and sliced some mushrooms. Looking back I wish I’d used a few nice oyster mushrooms for better presentation and a varied taste but chestnuts were fine. Fry off the onions so you get colour and add the mushrooms, again until you start getting a bit of colour.
When this stage is done you should start throwing in things such as worcester sauce, a beef stock cube, some chilli, pepper, maybe some concentrated liquid stock – anything meaty really. Let’s pretend we’re about to become vegetarians at the end of this meal.
Then add the porcini liqiud as your main stock. I normally pass the liquid through a sieve lined with a couple of paper towels. I must have read that somewhere and still do it. It catches grit or something. But then I dice the now soft porcini mushrooms and add that into my sauce.
Let the sauce reduce down until it’s nice and thick. Assuming my potatoes are taking an hour, I’d say that you’ll have added your porcinis maybe 10 minutes after slamming the potatoes into the oven. That leaves you 50 minutes to reduce it down. Plenty. You may even end up loosening the sauce a little with liquid from your veg.
Right, all that remains is for you to cook your steak and the veg. You can leave that until about 15 minutes before the potatoes are due to emerge. Chop some cauliflower and some broccoli into small florets and pour boiling water over. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes and they ought to be soft enough but not mush. I prefer my veg a bit harder but I cook for my wife and who am I to argue?
Get a frying pan nice and hot for your steaks. Oil the steaks, not the pan and season liberally. Fry for 4 minutes before flipping. I like my steak rare to medium but other wishes dictate a little longer.
After no more than 10 minutes everything should be ready to serve. I carved the steak neatly (which you can’t see beneath the mound of sauce) and then distributed the food artistically but quickly upon the plate. Salt and pepper and then eat.
